Love Thy Neighbor
Optimizing the Positive and Minimizing the Negative Impact of Large Events
By Peter Gorman
Enhance the lives of as many people as possible with your next event. There are always new and interesting ways to make an event more environmentally conscious and to have a positive effect on the local community, says Sarah Pease, owner and president of New York-based Brilliant Event Planning. Her favorite? Recycle flowers.
"If I put on a corporate event or a wedding for 300, well, there are going to be a lot of flowers. And to imagine them just being thrown away simply isn't acceptable."
Pease uses an organization that takes event flowers and distributes them to hospitals, homes for the elderly, veterans and so forth.
"That way they're beautiful not just for a few hours but can brighten lives for days," she said. "And I like having that positive effect on the local community."
However, Pease admits that not many clients ask her to minimize the negative effects when planning events, whether they're corporate or private.
"I'd love to tell you that clients bring it up, but the reality is that it is generally me who has to bring it up," Pease said. "Now and then I'll have a client ask for organic food, or to have electronic invitations to save on paper, but that's not par for the course."
Still, she admits that having it come up at all these days is more than what she heard 10 years ago.
When marine biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring about the environmental impact of pesticides in 1962, she had no idea that her book would spawn a worldwide environmental awareness movement. But even if she had imagined such an occurrence, it's difficult to picture her dreaming of the impact her work would eventually have on the hospitality market more than 45 years later.
The meeting and events industry at large has, after all, traditionally been fueled by excess, with companies holding events where limousines were de rigeur and goody bags stuffed with wonderful but useless treats that were left in hotel rooms to wind up in landfills. According to a Meeting Strategies Worldwide 2008 white paper, until very recently, the hospitality industry was second only to the construction industry in producing waste in North America. Conference attendees were producing 20 pounds of solid waste daily, compared to the 4.5 pounds daily they were likely to produce at home.
But thankfully, all of that is changing. It took the business world as a whole longer to catch on. But now that it has, "green" and corporate social responsibility (CSR) have surpassed buzzword status and are part of the business world's standard operating procedure. A significant result of this as it relates directly to the meeting and events industry is an increasing interest in positively affecting the local communities in which events take place.
The Color of Community
Greening events helps the local community in ways most might not consider. When recycling bins are put around an event venue, not only do plastics, paper and so forth get kept from landfills, they also boost the local economy of those involved in the recycling business. And there are several other ways large events have a positive effect on host communities. Events held in New York help fill Broadway theaters and midtown restaurants. Meeting planners who hold events in the low season generate work for seasonal workers who might otherwise be laid off during that time of year.
"We're always trying to optimize the benefit to our host community," said Robin Haines Johnson, who, with her husband Cody Johnson, runs the Great Mystery School, an organization based in Mallorca, Spain, that specializes in new age and consciousness-raising gatherings and tours.
The Johnsons' conferences run to about 1,200 and their tours to nearly 200-not extremely large, but certainly large enough to leave a noticeable footprint. Robin Haines Johnson says that she's learned over the years that one of the ways meeting planners can optimize the benefit to the local community is to ensure that local merchants benefit.
"If a conference is scheduled in a large hotel, especially a hotel chain, with all of the meals taking place in the hotel, then the rest of the community does not really benefit," she said. "At our recent Glastonbury conference, for instance, we held the meetings in Glastonbury Town Hall. Conference delegates stayed in local inns and B&Bs, ate all of their meals in local restaurants and no doubt bought gifts in local shops. They also walked to the conference from their B&Bs, minimizing the need for cars, hence pollution."
Because of their event's nature, the Johnsons' frequently add post-conference tours to historical sites, bringing a cash infusion to the community that many conferences do not include.
"Our feeling is that conferences don't always have to be held in all of the regular places," she said. "We like finding beautiful locations, interacting with the local businesses to arrange for what we need and planning a light and positive footprint. We've found that this helps our guests to receive a wonderful understanding of and appreciation for the land and the people at the conference locations. And that positive experience is something our guests and the community we're visiting take away with them beyond the scope of our conference."
Change Agents
"This is starting to change the culture of corporations, and they want that reflected in their events," said Tamara Kennedy-Hill, founder and director of the non-profit Green Meeting Industry Council.
Minimizing the negative impact from events and maximizing their benefits to local communities almost always go hand in hand, she says.
"Corporate planners are looking at green meetings and sustainability worldwide because more and more corporations have included an element of CSR in their plans, [with] an environmental and community component," Kennedy-Hill said. "[Corporations] want the world to know that their brands have meetings and events that reflect their social responsibility."
Barry Moskowitz, associate vice president of the Greater Miami CVB, first began to hear scuttlebutt about environmentally friendly events about five years ago.
"You know, like any movement at first you hear bits and pieces and you-or at least I-didn't really get it," he said. "But as people get on board and there are more programs and education and more buzz, it becomes second nature. And when it starts picking up steam and becomes a trend, well, if you're not in it, you're out in left field."
If you're not on board with the growing environmental movement, you're almost an outcast, Moskowitz says.
"People are very serious about it. It's going to get to the point where people are only going to do business with people who are environmentally responsible."
Asked about the Miami area, Moskowitz says that the Miami Beach Convention Center is being retrofitted to turn it into a green building.
"When it's finished, the building is going to be able to recycle water, it's going to be energy efficient and the chemicals used to clean the building will all be harm-free to the environment," he said. "We're changing faucets to have them only turn on when you put your hands under them rather than having them just run. In our own office, we're printing less paper and recycling what we do print. And all of that is benefiting the community we live in and the people who are doing that work."
And socially conscious locales also tend to attract events that wish to give back.
"People like to help people," Moskowitz said. "It's really that simple. It's a sense of giving that can only add to your company's luster."
The National Football League's (NFL) Super Bowl is undoubtedly one of the world's major single-day sporting events, and Moskowitz has had a hand in it twice.
"The NFL is one of the most generous organizations you can imagine," he said. "For about 15 years, wherever the Super Bowl is held, the NFL builds a youth center. The center offers tutoring, career planning, sports, you name it. That is community impact in the most positive sense. The game is over in three hours, but thousands of kids get something long after the players go home."
Community involvement is far from just a catch phrase when it involves large event planning, says Clare Sullivan Jackson, president and CEO of the Sullivan Group, a corporate event planner based in Houston.
"For us, how we impact the community is the core of our business," she said. "We encourage our clients to make a difference. If we can stage a strategic event for you that also benefits a local non-profit or school kids, then we've accomplished something special. And that is genuinely important to us."
Asked for examples Jackson doesn't hesitate.
"The Houston Independent School District had a program called Prepared for Life, which offers after-school activities for middle schools," she said. "We recently held a corporate event where we had a drum corps waiting outside the facility to give a real welcome to our clients. And we always have the kids in on our annual open house to get a feel for entrepreneurship."
Another event involving inner-city youth that the Sullivan Group is involved in is Lemonade Day, where kids are encouraged to set up lemonade stands around the city.
"We provide them with a workbook and they get to plan, set up and operate their own venture for a day," she said. "We had more than 3,000 lemonade stands around Houston last year."
"My mantra," Jackson said, "is if there is a higher purpose to holding your event, then let's do it. If you can bring your attendees together and aid the community, then you've got a great event. If you're holding an event with entertainment, we'll encourage you to reach out to local entertainers. It's a win-win; you get great entertainment and local entertainers get a paycheck."
The big daddy of all green visitors bureaus is Tourism Vancouver, which has been consistently ahead of the curve for environmental awareness and social responsibility in regards to minimizing the negative impact of meetings and promoting positive local impact.
"We're going so far as to be putting a six-acre green roof on our convention center," said Dave Gazley, vice president of meeting and convention sales for Tourism Vancouver. "All the water that comes off the roof will be collected and used for irrigation or graywater in the washrooms. We're even going to have a water treatment plant on site."
Gazley's quick list of tips for planners to green their events, regardless of size, includes not only recycling and waste-reduction strategies, but also takes into account utilizing local produce and environmentally friendly foods rather than bringing food in from an outside community.
"Using local produce has two major advantages," he said. "You not only save on fuel used to bring in food from other areas, but you boost the local economy. And then even that can get recycled by having leftover food brought to a local food bank."
Each and every one of these steps has a positive effect on the community.
"And while our industry used to be very bad, people at every level of it now are becoming socially aware of the consequences of our conventions and so we're seeing a lot of positive results," Gazley said. "And it's not just for good public relations, but because event planners and corporations think this matters. They're seeing the big picture on the one hand with environmental changes they can make and they're also seeing the microcosm in terms of how they're affecting their host communities."
Community Care Isn't Universal
Not everybody agrees with that. Bryan Jacobson, owner of Corporate Events Manhattan, whose clients include Small Luxury Hotels of the World, Deutsche Bank, Sony PlayStation, Dateline NBC, Chanel, Revlon, Nissan and a host of other major players in New York, says he's surprised at how infrequently he's asked about reducing the negative impact of events.
"It rarely comes up as far as I'm concerned," Jacobson said. "People don't ask me whether I'm going to recycle or what's going to happen with the leftovers. Personally, of course, we ask our vendors to recycle, but it's up to them. And if I owned my own venue it would be the greenest venue possible, but when a company wants an extravagant new product launch, the mission is to put on the best event possible-and some events are so short term they're difficult to green up.
"There's still a definite benefit to the community," he said, "because I'm using local people-set builders, caterers, actors and so forth."
In terms of environmental impact, for all the talk Jacobson says he's heard about it, he admits to being a bit cynical.
"I just think a lot of [the offerings] are gimmicks, because you just can't really build an event site green in a couple of hours," he said.
Jacobson's refreshing cynicism aside, others in his field feel differently.
Indeed, Silicon Valley's Darryl Scotti, founder of Darryl Scotti Events, says people are coming around.
"We've seen some interesting events in terms of greening things up in the last couple of years," he said.
Scotti, whose company runs corporate events that range from team building for groups as small as 60 to large events that can reach 2,000, says summer events have seen the most change.
"Most of our events are held in parks, such as San Francisco's Golden Gate," Scotti said. "And for summer events, where there are a lot of disposables used, people are asking us if we use green products and whether we recycle-things we didn't used to hear, which is fantastic. We've done that as best as possible for 25 years anyway, but it's good to hear it coming from clients. And we've always bought as much local food as possible, for instance, but that's just our style. Now people are asking whether we're going to use local food."
Scotti's professional reputation is that his company leaves parks as clean or cleaner than prior to their function.
"If we didn't do that I would not be able to work in those parks anymore," he said. "Basically, our job as event promoters is to keep things as green as possible. This is the community we live in and if we don't want to see other people trash it, that goes double for us."
And Miami's Moskowitz says that's really a major change for the industry.
"There's no question about it. We were slow to get on board-the whole industry-but little by little we've realized that you can't just leave a negative impact on the local community and the environment," he said. "And we don't need to. We can be positive all around for everybody."
The beauty of this movement-event planners proactively working to minimize harm and enhance benefits to their host communities-is that it's working from the grassroots up, Tourism Vancouver's Gazley says.
"And eventually it will reach even those people and companies who have been the worst offenders in terms of the negative impact their conventions and meetings have on their destinations and the larger environment."
PETER GORMAN is an award-winning freelance writer based in Joshua, Texas.